About Me
Professional
My career includes over 18 years of leadership and individual contributor roles across the spectrum of data science, financial strategy, and business analytics for EY, PG&E, KPMG, and Centene. I use tools like R, SQL, Python, GitLab, Posit’s Workbench + Connect, and Databricks on a daily basis. My teams apply data science techniques to empower decision makers with descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive insights. As part of Centene’s AI Center of Excellence, I develop and deploy automation pipelines, predictive models, interactive web apps, simulations, packages, REST APIs, and more.
Scatter Podcast
In 2019, I launched Scatter Podcast to share career tips and insights from data science leaders for students, business managers, and professionals looking to pivot into data science. It was a fun and incredibly rewarding side project but after 30 episodes, I started to feel fatigued with the amount of time it took to plan, record, edit, market, etc. The podcast is on hold but not dead!
Data Science & MLOps Toolkit
R: tidyverse, tidymodels, Quarto, XGBoost, Prophet, sparklyr, torch, Keras (+ TensorFlow), Shiny, Plotly, Leaflet, webR, devtools, usethis, dbplyr (communicate with databases by writing in dplyr syntax to create complex [or basic!] ETL and analytics pipelines that convert your dplyr code to SQL in the backend 🚀), and more
DevOps + MLOps: GitLab (+ CI/CD), GitHub (+ Actions/Workflows), Databricks (+ MLFlow), Docker, Posit Connect, Kubernetes, Rancher, Ubuntu, Bash
Data: Snowflake, Teradata, Databricks Unity Catalog, Apache Arrow, Apache Parquet, DuckDB, Polars, AWS S3, AWS Redshift, NetApp StorageGRID, Google BigQuery
Other: Python (I’m objectively terrible but w/ llama3.1, I’ve been known to impress myself and my team 🏆), Jupyter Notebooks, Agile Scrum (& the tools that surround it, e.g., Jira, ServiceNow, Miro, etc.), Netlify
Media + Presentations
[2024-04-27] UC Irvine hackathon talk on ETL with Arrow & DuckDB
[2023-09-26] SoCal RUG presentation on Highlights from Posit’s 2023 Annual Conference
[2023-09-25] R Consortium interview on Empowering Healthcare with R: Javier Orraca-Deatcu’s Journey from Finance to Predictive Health Models
[2023-03-21] SoCal RUG presentation on How to Build a Shiny App Demo as a Cover Letter Accessory
[2022-12-08] Posit hosted me on their Data Science Hangout to discuss Excel to Data Science to Machine Learning Engineering
[2021-10-15] UC Irvine’s inaugural Latinx Initiative Conference
[2021-06-09] Data Points: Healthcare and Finance virtual conference hosted by Grid Dynamics
[2019-06-13] Scatter Podcast on UC Irvine News
[2019-05-20] Winner of the Orange County Predictive Modeling Hackathon
[2019-04-14] Scatter Podcast mention on Forbes